Building the Next-Gen One-Stop Fintech Ecosystem, Vugar Usi Zade, Bitget | ETHSofia 2025

We're looking forward to hearing from you. Thank you, Fa.

Here I am. And thanks very much to our gentleman who had an very interesting panel. And I think it's a very like a logical continuation of of what was discussed here. Uh I'm the CEO of BitKet. And one of the main reasons we decided to come up with an idea of a bitkit was we hated the bank we used and I'm not sure any of these in the room had a problem with their own bank.

Please raise your hand and we see who hates the banks most and in this conversation I will tell you what we are doing different and how we can build the next bank-like organization. First and foremost I want to start with this very interesting chart for those who come from the tech background. uh very like a more of a less crypto more fintech uh idea. We always know that until last cycle we were talking about how bitcoin is a different asset. We fix our earnings in in bitcoin.

Then alt season comes and usually people who take the you know investment out from the bitcoin we're going to the alt season. This cycle there isn't an alt season but there's something else is happening. First time we see that there's a huge decoupling from a traditional financial markets like stock exchanges and bitcoin. Bitcoin start becoming a hedging tool for the financial institutions and that's why the colleagues were discussing here how European central banks or many other large financial institutions use today crypto as a tool to hedge rather than your next big investment. This chart also shows us a very good uh perspective when it comes to what banks do in terms of crypto and adopting the crypto and what cryptonative companies probably the ones that you work for or you built what they do different because I believe we are now blurring the lines between what is a traditional financial institution and what is an actual a crypto company.

We see that with the banks what's happening more and more banks trying to adopt a crypto whether it is your revolutes and monzas where you can directly buy crypto investment or it is JP Morgans who run on private chains. Uh and then there are more and more banks coming with a stable token especially after the genius act in US and in Europe more and more banks apply for digital asset provider or vasp licenses. While we see that more and more banks kind of try to adopt crypto and for them crypto is one of the features on the other end you have crypto exchanges decentralized exchanges layer ones layer zeros lay their twos who are also trying to interrupt the industry I was asked you this question about who hates their bank and I was the one who hated his bank and that's why we came with an idea but when we look at what happens in a financial institution industry especially if you are building something whether on ethereum or out two important data points. There are four of them like two are my favorite. First and foremost is 59% of the customers like us.

We are ready to switch from one provider to another if there's a benefit. It can be cheaper cost, faster solution and it applies whether you are using a mobile bank or you are using an exchange. I work for Bitkit but I'm sure many of you have our competitors like Bybit, Binance OKX also in your mobile apps and depending what tokens are offered what is the transaction cost you easily switch from one to another. Same applies for your bank. But there's another key point especially if you are someone building a solution.

Almost every customer in the industry we talk mainly B2B providers is ready to offer 8% more commission for a premium service. It means you are developing a better tool. You can definitely charge people more. And this is two key points to build the next generation of the tech solution or financial institution that you are working on. Keeping in mind first it's very easy to on board a new customer because previously that was the biggest or main challenge how we bring new people.

Today people are very well educated and they actually are very easily uh manipulated to switch if you have a little bit better product and then you will have a lot of partners who are willing to actually pay more. While you are able to kind of make more money in these two parts, I want to take you into this very interesting slide behind me. Two years, three years ago when journalists would ask me like oh where do you see Beachkate as a centralized exchange going in future? I would always say that we will become a bank-like organization doing the bank-like services. Today we see that more of like a bank-like organization.

Start offering exchange-like services. You can today almost open any new bank app or digital bank you have. You will probably get a service or solution where you can buy crypto, where you can trade commodities, where you can invest in US stocks. Eventually you open to a bitkit you will see an earned product similar to your bank with a higher APR like a 10%. You will have a lot of uh staking and earning opportunities within the industry and definitely you can trade it is kind of blurring this gap whether who will do better whether you are an exchange building a product or traditional institution who can bring more innovation then everything else become a service.

I think most of the time especially when you are a cryptonative like me we have too much love for our product and we think that we are changing the world. Yes definitely we are changing the world but most of the time changing the world is not a product it's just a feature. If you have a new bank with 100 million customers having a crypto is just a feature. Having a stock trading is just a feature. On the other end, when you build a great product, having a bank card is just a feature.

And from this point on, I want to take you to a journey how we build a product out of a feature rather than feature out of a product. This kind of five key points where as a financial institution, we can compete with everyone else. And that is our blueprint where we are trying to build the next big thing that will be stop talking about being a crypto exchange because our idea is to become a universal exchange a marketplace where you can swap everything and anything without labeling it centralized or decentralized without labeling it crypto or non-crypto because at the end of the day everything is just a feature and as long as you are the us you have the user ways and you can compete in every feature whether being fast whether being cheap you are able to gather more impact from the users because as I mentioned almost everyone is ready to switch from one place to another. Today at Bitket uh we are literally becoming the universal exchange whether it is our media products or earned products whether you having a bank card that is backed by USDT or any big cryptoc currency and eventually we also have bitkit pay that enable merchants to accept the payments with this kind of a big universe of the products we decided that we don't want to be a centralized exchange we want to become an exchange a universal exchange where We today offer stock markets. You can trade any US stocks on our platform.

You can literally stake your money whether it's USDT. You can get your returns on investment in any possible way. You can take Bitkate card, tap and pay anywhere supported by Visa and Mastercard. But if you're a merchant, you can accept a crypto payments. And with all this universe, today we probably serve 120 million users.

We move around 20 billion dollars. Today I think it's around 40 billion making us second largest exchange in the world and we are kind of learning in the way because while we are one of the biggest centralized exchange or centralized exchange part is a huge part of our business. We do offer bit wallet which is a decentralized service. We have $100 million investment fund and all these things together kind of build us one of the most strongest pillars in the industry where we are able to serve the customers better doing some things that much much different than everyone else. First and foremost is our production fund.

I'm sure many of you know what happened in the beginning of the year with uh bybe and then many other exchanges or services uh suffered some sort of a hack with protection fund. We were actually one of the first to jump in and help buy with it. We lended them 40,000 Ethereum after Binance and Galaxy also jumped in. Protection fund actually helps us to build and safeguard user funds making sure that if something goes wrong within our exchange, we can replace them. This is one thing that your probably your bank can't do because your bank relies on centralized uh bank whether it is your central bank or national bank whatever it's called and that central bank kind of can bail out banks or let the banks go bankrupt similarly what happened to credit Swiss or Silicon Valley bank with our protection fund we're actually able to withstand any external force that could halt our business it's the second largest in our industry mainly consist bitcoins.

It is valued around $750 million. It means we are much much stronger and secure than your average bank. And the one thing I really take a pride in that we never had suffered any serious breach or security hack. Not because we are a lucky bunch of people. I hope we still are.

But mainly the reason is that we have a very strict protocols in place. But another cool feature of an exchange that we can offer is a transparency which called proof of reserves. Basically every month uh we publish this report but it's kind of a digital system in place through the mercury. You can come and make sure that whatever asset you have in our exchange it is in there. We promise to keep it at 130% level.

Today it's 188%. Meaning 120 million of all our customers comes and they decide to take all their money out of exchange. We will have 88% more money left. It means we have more liquidity and more assets within our ecosystem than your average bank. For the people who are not from the banking industry, your bank is allowed to lend you 10 times more for every dollar.

Basically, if your bank have $100, it's allowed to lend $1,000 back. This is the difference between a centralized exchange like us where we have more money than we actually need within the ecosystem to make it more secure and more safe while your bank only requires to hold 10% of the assets that they actually operate. While building all this kind of a taking you through this differentiating journey. Actually today we are more than any bank as our service as a services we provide. But we are also very very different ecosystem because banks are there to make you some money.

And what makes the bank is uh different than an exchange is that banks sell you a service. As an exchange we generate value when you transact. Basically we have to come up with more ideas where we kind of motivate you transact within the ecosystem because otherwise we don't make money. While for your bank it is the very very different journey. I know for the friend friends friends who live in Australia or in UK, I'm not sure what's the situation in Bulgaria, but even if you decide to go to your own bank to withdraw your own money, your bank will put a limit.

They limit in many countries like $2 $300 and they'll charge you 1% just to take your own money back. Definitely that's not happening in crypto because we are faster, safer, and definitely much cheaper. Therefore, what we offer within our ecosystem is literally able to compete with any bank service. But what we also can do much much better because banks always go around and brag for this passive income where you can stake your money in crypto language or put in earning accounts. This is actually showing how our uh highlights from our uh earning platform where people were able to make x's and x's and x's in the return on investment.

The cool part about this investment uh opportunity within the bitkit is we have something called pool x where you can literally stake your USDTS and in return uh earn return on investment in the new project tokens that can make you a lot of money. While the cool things can be done much better in the earn side than compared any bank out there, what we really take pride is in our Bitkate wallet. We invested in Bitket wallet uh 3 years ago, it was middle of the bare market and when we invested $30 million, people thought we are super crazy that it's a bare market and we are trying to invest in a decentralized wallet. Today we surpassed both MetaMask and Trust Wallet. We move around 202 billion.

We have 80 million customers and this way we are kind of a bridging the centralized world with decentralized opportunities and there are two important lessons we learned by investing to a decentralized wallet and also we have to decentralized wallet to adopt what we are doing here. My favorite product is Bitcut card. This is kind of a first idea that we tested to bridge the true gap between the traditional finance and decentralized exchanges because I had a huge problem with my bank and they literally froze all my assets and I really needed to pay for the daily things like my coffee, my ride home and we decided why to reinvent the wheel while we can partner. Today we offer Vis and Mastercard through our ecosystem that you can tap and pay the same way you do with any other bank card which gives an very unique insights to us understanding what works and what doesn't work and how uh every transaction that we do is uh actually can make the money for an exchange after learning taking this learning as I mentioned in our bitket wallet we have a decentralized master card across the Europe Latin America in many basis people use it and because the transactions are usually below 3,000 it means you don't even have to KYC this way from the decentralized wallet we understood that actually there are better ways to build a payment gateway eventually on a centralized exchange and we did something much different we looked into the card payments and we realized that actually there's a huge need of a payment problem with card payments is the cards that are issued by the Visa card and Mastercard. These card payments eventually uh charge the merchant 1.

5%. With that 1.5% charge or commission, sometimes it goes up to uh 3%. What happens also merchant waits around 60 days to that payment actually settle. Now we are introducing a bit pay enabling merchants from across the world uh to accept payments with these payments.

First, it is cheaper, definitely cheaper than 3%, you all know how the payments work. Uh, and this settlements happens instantaneously. This way, we solve the people's cash flow issue and we offer an alternative to your traditional bank. And why did we do this? Because we noticed that even though yes, we are crypto heads and we like to invest, but we also like to spend.

And the data from the BitKit card actually showed that more and more people are willing to spend. By enabling the both payments and card, we are actually helping our users that they only need to do that trade only the moment of the transaction with that particular rate rather than your need to sell your bitcoin, take it into your fiat and put your bank account. This way we are able to build something we call the life on chain where you don't only trade but you can earn you can invest you can save and eventually you can spend within our ecosystem and you don't even need to live out and this way we are able to build a unique exchange where you can literally exchange on everything and lastly we have our own native token BGB token that is also a gas and governance token for the morph ecosystem making or enabling us to build all the transactions that happen whether your USDT stable token or any transaction within our ecosystem governed by our own token giving us a chance to better maneuver. Every bank that you operate charges you on the currency that government issued whether it is euros or dollars. It means the banks are less uh fluid on how much discounts they can give to you or how they can operate when they build their fees.

While because we have our native token, we can definitely build and do things much better. With this full ecosystem, we are determined to become the true universal exchange where we can offer you any service that you truly need from whether you're bank or trading partner or broker within our ecosystem. And because we are growing so fast, we've been grown from 11 million users to 120 million users in last two and a half years. Probably if we can continue this speed we are able we will be able to on board next billion users making every other service that is available there we can easily compete because every service will just become another feature on our ecosystem rather than being a product and one key takeaway I want all of you to kind of go home with today if you are building a product to understand is your product a truly a product or it can be replaced just be a feature And if it's a feature, it's always better to partner with a big player. But if you truly believe that it is a product and every comp competitor out there can become a feature on your platform, then you are building something truly remarkable.

Go and continue this. Thank you very much. Heat. Heat. [Applause] [Music]